Frank Conroy

Writer, teacher, jazz pianist, father of three sons, Frank Conroy has been the director of the highly regarded University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop since 1987. He is the author of Stop-Time (1967), a memoir, Midair (1985), a short-story collection, and Body & Soul (1993), a novel. Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now is Frank Conroy’s latest book. In it are collected his ruminations on various subjects that have been published in magazines such as GQ, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine and others. Additionally, Conroy has interspersed some new observations and insights throughout. Frank Conroy and his family split their time between Iowa City and Nantucket.

Robert Birnbaum: Let’s talk about the title of your book. Was it an option to choose whether it was "Dogs bark and the caravan rolls on" or "Dogs bark but the caravan rolls on"?

Frank Conroy: In English I have never seen ‘and.’ I have seen
‘but.’ It’s a Persian proverb but it’s hard to find its provenance. Proust
uses it in Remembrance of Things Past. The first time I saw it
was in some book where it was used the way I use it here: when Wynton
[Marsalis] complained to me about all the stuff they [the critics] were
writing [about him]. So it popped into my head.

RB: That conversation was included in the piece you published in 1995.
How long have you been carrying around this proverb as a potential book
title?

FC: Oh, a long time. Ten years anyway, at least. It just stuck in my
mind because there is a truth to it, you know.

RB: You do point out the elasticity of proverbs.

FC: Yes, they stretch and they last. That’s why they are proverbs. They
contain some nugget of stuff that keeps being useful and keeps being discovered.
And I like its quiet stoicism. (laughs)

RB: There is a wide range of topics in this book.

FC: Yes, I’ll say. That was really the gamblein a certain senseof
the book. There was a lot more than this. There were many, many articles
and things over the years. The question was selecting them and what would
be the principle. It really emerged gradually. First, I took the things
that I liked the best. And then laying them out, there was a lot of personal
stuff. So there is this covert, quiet, extremely small autobiographical
side to it. There is also the observation side to it. I guess (long pause)
it was really when I got to the Fitzgerald piece, and I thought, "Jesus
Christ, that’s it. That’s the piece to end this with." In a funny
wayeven though there is a tremendous amount of music in it and this
that and the other thingthat special feeling I have always had about
Fitzgerald, here finally was a place for it. In a way, it made for a modest
ending to a modest book.

RB: Where had that piece appeared before?

FC:GQ for Fitzgerald’s 100th anniversary. They commissioned it.
I worked harder on that piece than any other in the book. I reread all
of him, And the biographies. I got back into that time zone. Which was
fun. He always had a special significance to me.

RB: Do you end the book with Fitzgerald’s story because it is a cautionary
tale?

FC: Yes, sure, a little bit. And also because, yes the dogs may bark
but what’s in the caravan is hidden from view. As Saul Bellow sayswe’ll
know in a hundred years. Every book of Fitzgerald’s was out of print when
he died. And he thought it was all over and that Hemingway had won. Not
that they were in [direct competition]. But look who is on top now.

RB: You pointed out that The Great Gatsby sells 300,000 copies
a year. Is there any Hemingway book that rivals it?

FC: I don’t think so. I didn’t look up Hemingway. It would amaze me.
Hemingway sells and sells well, but I don’t think anything like Gatsby.
Every writer that I know thinks that Gatsby is a more important
book than anything Hemingway ever wrote. Gatsby has lastedin
a waythere’s a kind of magic in that book.

RB: You also express, in your book, disdain for Hemingway as a person.

FC: Well, I thought his behavior, particularly in terms of Fitzgerald,
was absolutely unforgivable. Fitzgerald went out of his way to help him,
introduced him to Sylvia Beach, his publisher, introduced him to everybody
in Paris. Gave him every possible break. Talked him up. It was the beginning
of Hemingway’s career. At the end it’s not like Hemingway is [just] talking
bad about himhe wants to pulverize him, grind him into the dirt.

RB: Did Hemingway really suggest that had Fitzgerald seen action in WWI
he would have deserted and been shot for cowardice?

FC: Yes, he did say that somewhere. I have heard the theory that Fitzgerald
was simply so beautiful that there was a part of Hemingway that was in
danger of falling in love with the guy. So he had to just tear him to
ribbons in his mind. And spit on him.

RB: Some theory

FC: It’s not so crazy either. Hemingway wasfor all the macho shithe
had some strange stuff going on.

RB: Did you feel any additional pressure because you have published
books intermittently over the years?

FC: No. I have never thought of writing as a career. I really never have.
Not even from the beginning. And not anywhere along. It just happens at
certain times. Actually my wife saidbecause of all these moldering
copies of things from years ago, just turning to dust right in front of
her eyes. She said, "Why don’t you put these in a book? Because they
are just going to disappear." I thought, "No, I don’t want to
do that. I have to go back and look at all those things and it’ll just
depress me." But I did, finally.

RB: Did it depress you?

FC:
No. Some of it depressed me mildly. Reading 25 pages I that wrote about
Steve McQueen, which is not in this book. Some of the stuff I did makes
me realize how young I was, how naïve and how little I knew. But
for the most part it was good. It made me feel good. Some of the pieces
I thought, "Jesus, that’s a good piece." (laughs heartily) Because
if you spend a month on a piece, like the piece about my teacher. And
then it’s done and finished and the magazine comes out and six months
later it’s gone and you forget it. But that was a good piece. So I got
enough of a charge from reading the better pieces so that it didn’t depress
me and it wasn’t a chore. And certainly I wasn’t thinking I have to have
a book. I thought it was interesting to write stuff now about stuff that
I had written a long time ago and not get too deep in it or not make too
big a deal out of it. It sort of fell together. Of course, it’s kind of
strange. There’s a lot of different stuff in it. In the end I’m proud
of it. I think it’s well written and well thought.

RB: Your piece on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop could probably save some
aspiring writers a lot of time and money.

FC: It could. But it’s hard to do it alone. But yes that’s the philosophy
that I developed as a teacher and I believe it works. Do you know that
here we are sitting in Boston and it’s April 2002. The prose class that
graduated in 2001 contained 25 people. Six have books coming out now,
this year. Six, a quarter of the whole class, in the first year after
graduation.

RB: (both laugh) Have you calculated how many students of the Workshop
have been published throughout its history?

FC: Well, the workshop is 65 years old. Nobody kept any records. We have
rough indications but nothing really complete. But I am almost positive
this has never happened before in the history of the workshop, a quarter
of the whole class published in the year following graduation. Unbelievable!
I couldn’t believe it myself. They can’t believe it. They’re the ones
that told me, of course. Two or three of them have said, "Do you
realize six of us "

RB: What does that indicate about the American publishing scene?

FC: Well, it’s interesting. It’s my belief that good book will still
get published. Unlike a good movie screenplay. They have a million of
them and they don’t care. But a good book will still get published. Publishing
has been influenced a lot by popular culture and the retailing of books
has changed. Popular culture is making a great deal of noise and actually
it’s a little bit better than it used to be. There are plenty of genre
writers today that make Mickey Spillane look like the lame ass that he is. There are some good writers. Michael Connelly. I just read that book [City of Bones]. It’s a wonderful thriller. The same thing happened
to me that happened to the reviewer. Unfortunately, I opened it up in
the morning and I finished at dinnertime. I read the whole book in a day,
one sitting. I was completely enthralled. Where was I? Oh yes, popular
culture has risen but it’s taking up a great deal more space. High culture
is still there; it’s just much quieter. The people in publishing are still
looking for good books. If they can get a good book they will still break
their asses to get it in print.

RB: There is the story of a young woman writer who based on one published
story in the New Yorker was offered a very large two-book contract.
And she turned it down.

FC: (laughs) It might have scared her.

RB: A lot of money seems to be being tossed around on not much of a track
record.

FC: It’s not wise or necessarily good for the writer. In fact as I say
more

RB: have been destroyed by success than by failure.

FC: Yes. I believe that. My point is, although everybody says it’s all
going to hell in a hand basket and American literary culture is all over,
really, that’s not true. It just looks that way from the outside because
popular culture is making so much noise and filling up so much space.
But high culture is still there. A good book will still get printed.

RB: Right. The book is not going to disappear.

FC: It all depends how you look at it. My colleague Marylynne Robinson
was being interviewed and someone said to her, "Don’t you think that
the image is taking over, the visual. That literature is doomed because
it’s all pictures, television, movies, that’s the popular thing."
She said, "I don’t know. I think the visual has lost quite a lot
of ground." He said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well
think about the impact, in the 14th century, on the mind of an illiterate
peasant who walks by the cathedral at Notre Dame and sees the gargoyles?"
(laughs) So it all depends how you look at it. My god, the students that
I am getting. These six getting published right away is an outside indicator
but for a subjective indicator I read about 289 manuscripts to pick my
class of 25. When I was down to the last 50 it was really, really tough.
They were sensational.

RB: That reminds me. Do you or can you still read one or two books a
day?

FC: Oh sure.

RB: How fast do you read?

FC: It depends on the book. I can’t read Faulkner that fast. Nor can
I read Dickens that fast. But I can Tolstoy like a shot. I read a Simenon
novel in an hour and a half. I can read very quickly when I need to. The
speed adjusts to what I am reading. It does take me three months to do
the admissionsthree months of reading. Half of it, right away I can
tell, "He got up in the morning and he shaved and went down to the
[makes a snoring sound.] (both laugh)

RB: Your piece "Father Feelings" caused me to recall the observation
that, "We all have two lives, one we learn with and one where we
live what we have learned." Could you have written that piece after
the birth of your first two sons?

FC: The first part of your observation is correct I don’t know about
the second part. I don’t know if it was because I had learned. I think
it was exactly the right time to write that piece because it was my last
son. The last contains all of them, in a funny way. When my first two
boys were born I was quite young and tremendously self-preoccupiedall
worried about myself. That’s changedI’m not so self-preoccupied. I’m
much more liable to simply sit down with him and chew the fattalk to
him about Tony Bennett, who he loves. There’s more time to be with the
young child. Of course, I knew when he was born that this was my last
child. So you think about it more. I saw all three of them yesterday.
Tim [the youngest] was almost like a practice child for them [the older
sons]. I’m a grandfather now, my oldest has two boys and he practiced
a little bit on Tim (laughs). It’s gets complicated, you know. It was
the right time in my life, not so much because I learned anything but
just because I had become more thoughtful and less preoccupied.

RB: The fatherhood role has changed a lot in less than a generation.

FC: Yeah.

RB: There is not a lot of good commentary or advice.

FC: No, there isn’t. I read a few things and it’s surprising how little
there is. There is some bullshit, of course. I meant what I wrote. I didn’t
have a father. So in being a father to these three young men at different
stages I made the father that I didn’t have and inhabited that role. In
that sense I learned something.

RB: That sounds like an inversion of the Jose Marti phrase, "I am
the son of my son."

FC: Yeah. Well, yeah. You could play around with that a lot. Sure.

RB: I was struck by the observation you made that your generation was
the last in which being a teenager was nothing.

FC: The lowest of the low. We weren’t organized. Hey, it was the Eisenhower
years. It was the ’50s. Being a teenager was nothing. There weren’t enough
of us. We had no economic power base the way the kids did in the ’60s.
We didn’t have any money. We worked all the way through school. When I
was Styvesant I had a job and every summer we would work. Particularly
as teenagers in the early ’50s there wasn’t any sense of a culture.

RB: What about the juvenile-delinquency hysteria?

FC: Yeah there was a stereotype of juvenile delinquency and gangs. But
that was rather special and exotic. It was more like Doris Day and things
like that. The buying power of the kids in the ’60s, that’s why there
is all this shit on the radio because the kids have the money to buy it.
Otherwise, there would be music. In our day, we didn’t have any money,
we had jobs. I spent the money I earned to eat and buy paperback books25
cents for thin ones and 35 cents for the thick onesand go to the movies.
That was it. In those days it was possible, there was a cigar store on
Lexington Avenue, to read everythey were up against the wall on racks,
the length of the store, a lot of booksit was possible once you got
a jump on it to actually read every fucking book sold in that store. Which,
I did (laughs).

RB: Do you speculate about what might have been had you been a more dedicated
musician?

FC: That’s part of what Body & Soul was. It came out of a
number of things but one of them was, "I wonder what would have happened
if I had a good teacher and had the discipline." I got pretty good
just teaching myself, so it’s not impossible that I could have been good.
And then I thought he’ll be much, much better. Because I have had just
enough of a taste of it, playing public and when I had the quintet. There
were special nights when I had just a little taste of what that feels
like when everybody in the band is an inch and a half off the floor. I
know what that means. So I knew enough of it to be able to go in imaginatively.
And of course, books and music have been the two big influences in my
life.

RB: You seem to have the best of both worlds. You play. You had one of
the giants [Charles Mingus] of 20th century music commend you

FC: Boy, that freed me of a lot of self-doubt and worries. When he came
up and played with me. I thought, "Well, maybe I can’t play in E
flat or F sharp"which on a jazz piano you should be able to play
in all keys. I can’t play in F sharp to save my life. I can’t even play
in C sharp. There were all sorts of lacunas and vast areas where I lagged.
But he freed me. I thought, "Fuck, if he gets up from his dinner.
Crazy, manic-depressive, I don’t care. Comes up here picks up the bass
and plays with me for an hour, I’m doing something right." We playedas
I say in the bookseveral times. He would come to my club and sit in.
I never officially played with him it was just sitting in, late at night
mostly. Sometimes at Bradley’s, three o’clock in the morning.

RB: Do you still play?

FC: Yeah, but I have arthritis. I don’t play quite as much. I play at
least once a week with a bass player and once in a while with a group.

RB: The book includes an essay on small-town America. You spend eight
or nine months a year in Iowa City, Iowa

FC: which I love. I’m a completely born-again Midwesterner. I hope
the secret doesn’t get out how much better and cheaper it is to live there,
and more satisfying and civilized. Well, Tim [the youngest child] was
a babe in arms when we went there and his whole life has been Iowa and
Nantucket. When we drive East, its the cliché, He says, "Geez,
nobody smiles around here. What’s the matter?" (laughs)

RB: So Iowa City hasn’t been franchise-infested and re-gentrified?

FC: No, no.

RB: Too far away?

FC:
I think so and it’s a research university in a small town. There is no
town/gown struggle. It’s very civilized. There aren’t enough good restaurants.
I miss the food and, of course, there isn’t any jazz or music to speak
of except what comes through. Wynton [Marsalis] comes through every couple
of years and plays in this big Federal arts Palace, Hatcher Auditorium.

RB: No university jazz program?

FC: Yes, there is and it’s quite good. We have a band. We call
it Close Enough. I named it. There are two pros and a kid guitar
player and university vice president. So I said we better be honest, let’s
call ourselves, Close Enough. (laughs).

RB: You are person who grew up in the big city and now you live in a
place distant from the so-called cultural center

FC: that stuff is important when you are young and you believe
there is a center. You really think there is something there. It really
turns out there isn’t. But it’s important to believe that when you are
young and you are growing and you have to meet people and all of that.
I left New York when I was 35 and I lived in Boston for about six years
and then I worked in Washington and commuted between Washington and Boston.
Then I went to Iowa. Now I don’t like to come east. It’s too much hassle.
I don’t like flying, it’s no fun any more and it’s uncomfortable and it
takes forever and you get pushed around. I feel like I am closer to center
of American literary culture than anyone I know. This could be an illusion
but I think I am.

RB: Because of the workshop. You think the workshop is the center.

FC: Absolutely. Without question.

RB: Because?

FC: Because they come. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. They see that
in the 2001 class 25% get published.

RB: There are a lot of good writing programs today. Maybe the way to
measure their worth is by counting published graduates?

FC: I don’t know if there is a way to quantify it. I don’t spend a tremendous
amount of time worrying about that. The fact is, it is a self-fulfilling
prophecy. They keep coming. And they come to Iowa when they are offered
a lot of money to go to other places. They know the people they are going
to be with are the crème de la crème of their generation.

RB: How do you explain that?

FC: I don’t know. It started off because it was the first one. In the
very beginning Engle could get very big names for not very much money.
It began like that and then you had people like Flannery O’Connor. That
didn’t hurt. Much later you had people like John Irving. That didn’t hurt.
And Vonnegut completely renewed his career there. He was almost finished
as a writer until he came out there to teach. He wrote Slaughter-House
Five and the whole thing started. All the way along the line something
happened to revivify it and keep it going. Donald Justice was a perfect
influence in terms of American Poetry. He’s right down the middle. He’s
not bullshitting anyone. He’s a really good, honest writer and a tremendous
talent. That influenced a whole generation of American poets.

RB: There’s you and Marylynne Robinson. Who else has been there a long
time?

FC: Actually McPherson has been there a long time. And Ethan [Canin]
is the newcomer

RB: When I spoke to him he said he loves Iowa City.

FC: Oh yeah. He’s got two kids. Hey, the schools are great. There are
tennis courts and swimming pools. I love to pay my taxes in Iowa. Hey,
wonderful! I’m involved and go over to the high school and talk to the
students and classes and try to de-mystify some of the stuff about writing
and the workshop. The whole state of Iowa is proud of it and aware of
it. That makes a difference too.

RB: I read a review by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post
that your take on the critics of Keith Jarrett, that American music had
been ruined for a long time by academic forces, why couldn’t that same
argument be used against the workshop(s) and American literature?

FC: I was thinking of Schoenberg and serial music and what I attacked
in Body & Soul. Where he is coming from, I don’t know? I’m
not what you would call an academic writer. My work doesn’t seem to me
to be particularly academic. Each book is different. The first was an
autobiography, the second was a book of short stories, the third was a
big fat novel

RB: I can guess where he is coming from

FC: Where is he coming from?

RB: It would seem that he thinks that if writers go to school than means
they are academic.

FC: It depends what you call a school and depends what goes on. If he
is talking about the people who went to the workshop he has his head so
far up his ass there is no point talking to him. Holy mackerel, there
are too many writers, all over the place, writing different styles, different
subjects, different approaches

RB: You do, in the book, state that there is no such thing as an Iowa
story or fiction.

FC: That’s the calumny, that’s the calumny

RB: that’s what people who don’t or aren’t paying close attention
think: if writers are going to schools and workshops somehow that the
fiction, stories and narrative are being manufactured. That there is something
desiccating about going to school to learn how to write.

FC: I can see how that would happen. In fact, I believe that you are
right that there are a lot of workshops around the country and as you
say a lot of them are good. But I am much more impressed by the fact that
perhaps 75% of them are counterproductive and are being run by people
who think they know what they are doing but don’t. One of the strengths
of the Iowa Workshop is the writers who are there not so much as teachers
but coaches. That’s what we are. We are coaching and editing. The fact
that we are doing it in a protected environment which happens to be a
universitythat’s a name. That’s all that is. We are doing what editors
used to do in the ’30s. We are doing what Maxwell Perkins used to do.

RB: And what better editors do these days

FC: Some editors do it but fewer. There are not too many. Why did everyone
go to Paris in those days? To hang out with other like-minded people.
So, that is happening at Iowa too. They learn from each other and they
learn a great deal and it speeds things up for them. But the idea that
we teach a technique or have a pedagogical philosophy or we have theorythe
idea that it’s a linear experience, is ridiculous. It’s a circle. Everybody
teaches it a different way. I don’t really care about it that much but
sometimes it irritates me. Like that Exquisite Corpse guy attacking workshops with his shotgun approach. As if there is something wrong. As if you have to be isolated and lonely and
alone in a cave, gnawing a few bones with out enough to eat and be deprived
and then you can be an artist.

RB: What you are railing against is a perception which in part is that
writing has become a career and that people go to workshops to find out
how to get agents and enter into the vocational training as opposed to
doing the work. That seems to be a perception.

FC: And for some people that might be true. There is the stuff called
‘pobiz,’ poetry business. I think that poetry is in more trouble in that
regard. I don’t see a problem myself. Maybe I’m blind or insensitive to
things that other people can see that I can’t see because I’m in it. But
what am I in? What does it feel like subjectively? I can’t wait for workshop.
I can’t wait to talkthe level of discourse is so high and exciting.
After 16 years it still surprises me and amazes me and doesn’t repeat
itself. It’s amazing. It’s wonderful. The thing is, if the books resembled
each other or if there was any way that you could tie them together by
any other factor than the fact that these people went to Iowabut failing
that it’s just noise.

RB: Yardley’s review was also interesting in that he seemed compelled
to end on an up beat note by citing your encounter with Charles Mingus.

FC: I thought it was kind of a confused review. I was very happy that
he treated meobviouslywith respect. I was flattered by that. I think
that there are too many different things in the book to write a short
little piece about it. There’s music, there’s jazz music, there’s so called
classical music. There’s pedagogy. There’s fatherhood. There’s women:
there’s a lot of stuff in it. But, I don’t learn anything from reviews.
I haven’t learned anything from any of the reviews of any book I wrote,
including the first one. Which had hysterical reviewsyou would have
thought they were talking about Jesus Christ.

RB: Your book reminds me of Edward Hoagland’s Compass Points

FC: that’s on my list. I can only really read freely in the summer.
There are a lot of books that I should have read, that I haven’t.

RB: That’s true for a lot of people. I’m astounded that you can read
so quickly.

FC: Well, it’s a blessing and an accident. It doesn’t mean anything.

RB: Well, it means that you can read a lot more books.

FC: Yes it does. If you look at it that way. I’m sure that I have readI
don’t know who to compare myself to?

RB: Thomas Jefferson?

FC: No, we have to stay in this time. Let’s take an intelligent history
professor with an interest in the novel. I’m sure I have read four or
five times more books than he has. (long pause). It’s a drug. I’m a junkie.
It’s my drug.

RB: In "Dogs Bark " you claim that the Beats co-opted
jazz and didn’t understand it.

FC: That’s correct.

RB: None of them?

FC: They thought it was all some kind of expressive jungle music without
any form. As I say in the book you have to compare it to baroque music,
in terms of a figured bass, in terms of the harmony and in terms of the
lines. It’s very, very organized music. It sounds sometimes completely
wild. But it never is. Never.

RB: Were the Beats just reverse racists, lionizing the music out of need
to patronize black artists?

FC: No, just their narcissism, their blindness to anything except their
own experiment and their desire co-opt other energetic things that were
happening into their experiments, to give them more energy. The one thing
you have to say about them is that they were sincerely interested in America,
in the country.

RB: Any thoughts of writing another novel?

FC: Oh I don’t know. I don’t think of writing as a career. I never have.
It’s not impossible.

RB:Body & Soul, your novel, was based, in part, on
your wondering what might have been in your life.

FC: To some extent. It was also driven by anger as my first book was.
Anger at the fact that serious American music, jazz aside, had been more
or less destroyed for thirty or forty years by Schoenberg and serial music.
It wiped out American music for at least 25 years. Let’s say that. So
that made me angry. I really disliked that whole philosophy of codification.
It was very Nazi-like. It was another ism and I am suspicious of isms.
So that book was driven by anger at that and also a fantasy of what would
have happened and also it was a homage to the great 19th century novels
that got me through life.

RB: So you’d have to get angry again to write a novel?

FC: Hey, I don’t know. I might write a novel again if my feet feel better.